In 1990, trumpeter Ray Vega made trombonist/ethnomusicologist Christopher Washburne
aware of Eddie Palmieri's "Páginas de Mujer," introducing it with the words, "This
is your bible, study it hard." The specific bit of chapter and verse referred to
was a 24 measure trombone solo played by Barry Rogers. It's not just brass players who feel
this way, as evidenced by a recent statement by pianist Oscar Hernández. "I knew
all of Barry's solos by heart, I could sing them all. I could say that Barry is
probably the instrumentalist other than pianists that had the biggest influence on me." In
a 1967 Saturday Review
article, the art historian and mambophile Robert Farris Thompson predicted the scope
of the Rogers influence. "The chief proponents of this music [salsa] , a new solution
to the problem of Afro-Latin form, are two intelligent New Yorkers named Eddie Palmieri and Barry Rogers.... I do not think that it is an exaggeration to suggest that
the Eddie Palmieri ensemble is artistically the most promising dance band now performing
in the United States." The promise sensed by Thompson more than thirty years ago
was fulfilled; salsa became one of the world's major dance musics. Eddie Palmieri's
role in this development has been acknowledged, at least in part. The same can hardly
be said for his chief collaborator.

True enough, it was evident to 1960's habitués of the Palladium Ballroom or the Palm
Gardens that the tall, skinny blanquito
with long hair taking the trombone solos wasn't Cuban or Puerto Rican. It was equally
evident that this didn't matter, and it was even more evident that everyone danced
their toochises
off whenever he played. For thirty years it's been quietly acknowledged that the
trombone presence in the sound of salsa was ushered in by un otro judío maravilloso.
What hasn't been acknowledged is how this same man blurred distinctions between cultural
outsiderdom and insiderdom as few have ever done. What isn't known is how this same
person brought the white heat of salsa into the musical smelting foundry known by
the mid 1970's as fusion. What's rarely mentioned is his flair for directing musicians
in a studio setting, and his uncanny sense of how to transform raw tape into finished
product. It's hard to believe how one individual could express himself with as much competence and as much passion and have moved and inspired as many fellow humans
as did Barry Rogers. Critical assessment is long overdue; hopefully, this article
will help narrow, if ever so slightly, this gap between achievement and appreciation.

Bronx roots and beginnings

Barron W. Rogers (a name that he cordially detested) was born in the Bronx on May
22, 1935. Descended from Polish Jews who came to New York via London, the Rogers
family (original name: Rogenstein) possessed abundant musicality. As youngsters
living in East Harlem, Barry's father William and several of his uncles sang in the choir of
Joseph Rosenblatt, one of the great cantors of the twentieth century. The natural
beauty of their voices was matched by improvisational gifts; family legend also maintains
that William Rogers showed enough ability as a sculptor to have been offered an apprenticeship
to Sir Jacob Epstein. The only member of this generation to pursue the arts professionally
was Barry's uncle Milton, who maintained an active career as a pianist, composer, educator and bandleader (and whom Barry credited as a major role model.)
The realities of the Great Depression guided William Rogers in a different direction.
Also a gifted student of the natural sciences, he opted for a job teaching high
school biology in the New York City schools. His charisma and personal charm had an
unforgettable impact on several generations of young Bronxites; the Rogers family
recalls numerous former pupils who kept in touch with him long after their graduation
from public school. This was equally true of Barry's mother Phyllis Lacompte Taylor, a
brilliant zoologist who also taught public school science. A woman of mixed WASP
and French roots whose ancestors came to the United States during the eighteenth
century, she was a perfect candidate for DAR membership other than her leftist political orientation.
A fiercely independent spirit long before women's liberation officially existed,
Phyllis Rogers's teaching career coexisted with a considerable amount of field research in Mexico, the Caribbean basin, and Africa. These trips inspired her to study
the traditional musics she encountered from an anthropological perspective, which
was accomplished largely through collecting field recordings and commercially issued
discs. As a child and young adolescent, Barry was exposed to both folkloric and popular
music from West Africa, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Family members and friends believe
that records of late 1940's New York mambo music were also brought home by Mrs. Rogers. In an interview with Robert Farris Thompson, Barry made it clear that hearing
Tito Puente's "Babarabatiri" was his equivalent of St. Paul viewing Damascus; there
would be no turning back. Given his listening experiences and his maternal influences,
it's hardly surprising that during his teen years Barry became passionate about Afro-Cuban
music in all of its manifestations. His wife Louise Rogers remembers one very
unique and long-lasting expression of this addiction. "One thing he really
did well and always amazed me, he could do this sort of old man coro singing. He
sounded like one of those little wizened guys in La Sonora Matancera. He would screw
his face up and the trombone would hang on his arm and this funny voice would come
out of his mouth and it never came out at any other time." Barry was one of the few New
Yorkers who actively collected African records during the 1950's. This was one of
many interests he shared over the years with percussionist Ernest Philip "Phil" Newsum,
who offered the following observation: "Either it didn't turn him on or it was great
music, but nothing was ever strange to him. It seems like everything he heard he
could understand right away. It made sense, it was comprehensible. Sometimes he
would scare me because he could catch on to things so fast." Much of Barry's demonstrated
ability to assimilate sounds from other cultures is readily explainable in light
of the music he heard both before and during the onset of puberty.

By age thirteen, another obsession had entered Barry Rogers' life - cars. One result
was a spectacular loss of interest in school, accompanying an equally precipitous
drop in grades. After a brief period at Evander Childs High School, Barry transferred to Bronx Vocational, a school attended by few Bronxites of his ethnicity and family
background. One of Barry's friends from this period, a drummer named Lenny Seed,
observed: "You'd go to his house and there'd be engine parts all over the place.
He could fix cars and he was into hot-rodding when I first met him. He'd hang around with
all these hot rod guys in the Bronx, not musicians. Black leather jacket guys, you
know? There was a funny thing at his memorial service, when Mike Brecker spoke
he said, 'Barry Rogers was the first Jewish guy I ever met that knew how to fix a car'."
By the time he arrived at Bronx Vocational, Barry already had a year or so of trombone
playing under his belt (it is not known exactly how old Barry was when he began playing, his son Chris thinks that he may have started at age sixteen.) One of Barry's
extracurricular activities at Bronx Vocational was playing in a small mixed Latin
combo of students that included a Dominican saxophone and clarinet player named Johnny
Pacheco. It wasn't long before Barry was introduced to percussionist Benny Bonilla, pianists
Rupert Branker and Arthur Jenkins, and other Bronx Latin music performers. It must
be pointed out that non-Latin residents of Harlem, Morrisania, and Bedford-Stuyvesant had easy access to Latin music through local record stores, black-oriented radio
stations and live venues. In fact, it was not unheard of for African-American teenaged
musicians to be hooked on Latin before becoming jazz players. It was in this particular milieu that Barry Rogers obtained his first significant experience in playing
Latin music, rather than in a context of playing in all-Latin bands for strictly
Latin audiences.

Chicken and booze

By the early 1950's Barry was playing Latin music with groups of Latinos, black Americans
and white ethnics in lounges, dance halls, and nightclubs all over Harlem and the
Bronx. He had also discovered jazz and began frequenting Branker's, Count Basie's,
and any clubs that held jam sessions. The spring of 1956 marked the beginning of
his most significant pre-Palmieri musical experience, a band led by an African American
tenor saxophonist named Hugo Dickens. The bread and butter of Hugo's work (and that
of competitors such as David Preudhomme "Joe Panama," Alfred Du Mire "Al La Paris,"
and Henry "Pucho" Brown) was dances thrown by the African American social clubs of
Harlem, a thriving scene during the 1950's. Although a soft-spoken gentleman, Hugo
always had the ability to relate well to club members and promoters; in his heyday (ca.
1955 to 1960) he was able to provide regular (if not high paying) employment. The
work consisted of fashion shows, afternoon cocktail sips, and "chicken and booze"
dances (audience members reserved tables and brought their own brown bags and bottles.) These
affairs took place at Harlem venues such as the Savoy Ballroom, Dawn Casino, Audubon
Ballroom, Rockland Palace, Broadway Casino, Royal Manor, Renaissance Ballroom, and
the Celebrity Club. It was taken for granted that a musician working the "chicken and
booze" circuit would be able to play jazz, rhythm and blues, calypso, and Latin.
This was particularly true of Hugo's various units, considering the caliber of many
of his musicians (Marty Sheller, Bobby Porcelli, Bobby Capers, Peter Sims "Pete La Roca,"
Eddie Diehl, Hubert Laws, Ted Curson, and Rodgers Grant are only a few of Hugo's
better known side musicians.) Barry's arrival in the Dickens organization more or
less coincided with Hugo's decision to reduce the size of the group. A long time Dickens-ite,
Phil Newsum recalls the transition. "Before Barry came into it the band was really
chart-bound. But when Hugo put the big band aside and we started going out with
the three horn front line, Barry really took over how it was organized. Hugo handled
the business but Barry would say, hey, you do this and I'll do this and you do that.
We weren't using charts, it was all head arrangements. And the freedom that it
gave everybody made all the guys really happy because not being bound by the charts, everybody
who had this kind of jazz disposition anyway, they felt like they had unlimited freedom
to be creative, which they did. And the band kind of took off and everybody's morale went up, we were just one happy bunch of dudes. A lot of that I believe was
due to Barry."

This freewheeling atmosphere was an ideal setting for developing the concept of playing
"hard bop" a la Art Blakey or Horace Silver with the underpinning of authentic Afro-Cuban
rhythm. A key point of origin for this approach can be found in the early 1950's conjunto recordings of Tito Rodríguez, many of which were very popular in Harlem.
Phil Newsum cites Rodríguez's version of "Sun Sun Babae" in this context. "The break
in 'Sun Sun Babae,' the one with the repeated rhythmic figure - it wasn't always
exactly the same but Rodríguez incorporated a similar type of thing in one tune after
another. Even the later ones like 'Ol' Man River,' they had three breaks in the
middle and then the rhythm would come in, there would be a piano break and the rhythm
would come in. He incorporated ostinato figures in the middle of a lot of his mambos and
then having the rhythm come in behind in furious - it was very effective, it was
wonderful. But all of the stuff that those conjuntos recorded was very rhythmically
oriented and really appealed to the black community of Harlem. They really identified
with it because it minimized the amount of Spanish and maximized the rhythm, so that
the language didn't mean much." All of Hugo's sidemen and numerous audience members
speak fondly of Dickens' "Ol' Man River Mambo." Other numbers frequently recalled are
"Speak Low," "Nica's Dream," "Old Devil Moon" and "Spontaneous Combustion"; typical
Cuban tunes in the book included cha chas such as "Chanchullo" and "Los Marcianos"
and the danzón "Almendra." Whether based on the changes of a 32 bar song or on the more
open form characteristic of a montuno, solos from alto player Bobby Porcelli, trumpeter
Marty Sheller, and Barry Rogers were common.

Not much recorded evidence of African American experiments with Latin music characteristic
of the later '50's has survived. There are no known commercial recordings of any
of Hugo Dickens' groups; the best existing documentation consists of 8 millimeter
films taken by Barry (unfortunately there are no soundtracks.) One of the most frustrating
examples of this situation is the lack of any recordings of Hugo's experimentation
with multiple trombones. An eyewitness for this trend is Steve Berríos, Junior, who by 1961 was playing both trumpet and percussion with Latin-oriented uptown groups.
He remembers the presence of two trombones in some of Hugo's interpretations of
"Ol' Man River," "Work Song," "Chanchullo," "Nica's Dream" and "Saint Thomas"; other
trombonists besides Barry included Steve Pulliam, John Gordon and Jack Hitchcock. Steve
Berríos and other informants remember that one trombone would play repeated riff
figures and the other one would respond to these figures by soloing in a call-and-response style. It's experiences such as this that Barry recalled in a 1977 WBAI-FM interview
with Pablo "Yoruba" Guzmán. "It was a school for us all, that's where I was really
first exposed to Latin music. And boy, did I learn a few things about the world
and life and music, that was my first experience with really heavy playing. And when
I came out of that I ran into Eddie and I just threw in there what I had learned
in the past three or four years with Hugo's group." It's no accident that all of
the surviving participants in the Sabú Martínez and his Jazz Espagnole
recording are Hugo Dickens alumnae. The importance of Mongo Santamaría's post-charanga
groups to the emerging Latin jazz of the 1960's is undisputed; key Mongo sidemen
such as Bobby Capers, Rodgers Grant, Hubert Laws, Bobby Porcelli, and Marty Sheller
are all graduates of the Hugo Dickens Academy. Perhaps the most far-reaching importance
of the uptown Latin-oriented scene is that this is clearly where Barry Rogers developed
a personal interpretation of African-based music that was to reach its full fruition with Eddie Palmieri's La Perfecta. For this reason, Hugo Dickens and his colleagues
can lay claim to no small portion of salsa's patrimony.

Perfecting La Perfecta

One of salsa's most influential figures began as a bandleader in 1960, when the use
of this word as a magnificently effective catch-all phrase was very much a thing
of the future. Active at first fronting trios for weddings, bar mitzvahs and hotel
engagements, Eddie Palmieri longed for a vehicle to play the rugged Cuban music so dear to
his heart. The key to reaching this goal became considerably clearer after a visit
to a social club called the Tritons, located above Loew's Spooner Theatre in the
Hunts Point sector of the Bronx. This is where Eddie heard Barry jamming with the likes
of Johnny Pacheco and the rest was history - this, at least, is how Eddie usually
tells the story. Trumpet player Joe de Mare remembers leading a Louis Prima-style
shuffle band that included both Barry and Eddie; de Mare claims that Barry was aware of Eddie's
rhythmic genius from the get go. Not surprisingly, one of the earliest instrumentations
that Eddie used to express his musical vision was a conjunto. Here's Barry's first memory of the next stage. "We started with one trombone and a rhythm section
and a singer and that was the group. 'Cause when we got together and jammed it just
blew everything away. So he got rid of the trumpets and we just worked as a quintet
for some time. Then we added George Castro on flute and the last thing to come in was
the second trombone, that was at least a year after we started the group."

The first regular second trombonist with La Perfecta was Mark Weinstein. Although
he can be seen in the photograph on the cover of the Alegre album Eddie Palmieri: La Perfecta,
the second trombone parts are actually played by a Brazilian named Joao Donato.
After approximately one year Mark moved to Europe and was replaced by Joe Orange,
another excellent jazz trombonist. During the year of Joe's tenure the album El Molestoso
was recorded (Mark Weinstein came back for the bolero "Contento estoy," which uses
three trombones.) By the appearance of Lo Que Traigo Es Sabroso
the second trombonist was José Rodrígues, a Dominican who had resided in Brazil for a number of years, and who stayed with Palmieri until
1974. Eddie Palmieri recalled what is considered by all (including Weinstein and
Orange) to be his most successful trombone section. "Barry Rogers and José Rodrígues
were so opposite in what they individually could do and we worked it that way. For example,
Barry was involved in singing coro so when we'd play a mambo the first part would
be given to José or the highest notes would be given to him, anything that would
make it easier for Barry, who always had problems with his lip. Fever sores, that was
a problem. He taught himself to play the trombone in the unorthodox way of learning
and put too much pressure and that took a lot out of him. And even José Rodrígues
told me once, 'If he keeps playing the way he plays he's gonna die.' that instrument
takes so much out of you and the way he plays! Just the recordings told you that,
imagine live! Those trombones, when they used to get into a riff behind the
flute they don't stop and then Barry just takes off and keeps going and we just kept pushing
and pushing. That instrument is not an instrument to be able to do that
and they did it. And unfortunately it cost them dearly because they both passed
away, they were both young."

La Perfecta's flute and two trombone lineup drew immediate comparison with the instrumentation
of charanga, which was still hot in New York; in fact, Charlie Palmieri baptized
the group with the name trombanga. But the model for Eddie's music was certainly not charanga, at least in regard to musical form. For Mark Weinstein, the model
that inspired Eddie and Barry was Chapottín. "If you know enough about Cuban 78's
from the '40's and early '50's you hear a lot of Eddie's arrangements. But think
of the Chapottín album that has a very sort of abstract, almost cartoon-y cover with Miguelito
Cuní. That's the best Chapottín, with 'Quimbombó' on it. And that was the model,
there were a couple of other conjuntos. But it wasn't really a matter of stealing.
Because Eddie's band, bizarrely, was Cuban revivalist, and the model of the trombone
improvisation came from the way Chapottín, the soloist, would play against the trumpets.
Then Barry extended that, but that was the model." One clear example of the kind
of "borrowing" described by Mark is "La Gioconda" as recorded by Orquesta Aragón on
their album Danzones de Hoy y Ayer.
The uptempo final section of the Aragón version opens the version of this tune recorded
by La Perfecta on El Molestoso
almost note for note. The main differences is the substitution of two trombones
for violins and lowering the key from E minor to C minor, which makes it easily playable
in its new instrumentation. Weinstein describes the "road map" for a representative
Palmieri/Rogers chart. "You play down the head and there'd be the first montuno,
in the first montuno Barry would always be singing coro. And while the singer was
improvising Barry'd turn around and during the four bars of the singer's improvisation
he would play something for me to play, picking it up either out of the air or from something
the singer had sung or whatever. I then had to get it from him in that interval
and then if I didn't get it the first time he'd do it again, if I didn't get it the
second time he was angry at me. Then I'd start playing that lick, Barry would join in
playing the lick with me in unison, then in harmony and then the shit would happen.
Barry would then start slowly, almost the way a sitar player develops a solo, he
would start to very slowly move that lick into not quite a solo but into a sequence of ever
increasing sophistication. We outswung Tito's band with all of his fuckin' cymbals,
with all of his triplets, with all of his sticks over his head. Because when Barry
would get the pots on there was nothing in the world that was more exciting, nothing, nothing!
Not all of the high notes, not all of the screaming trumpets and the saxophones.
When Barry would start to move through a sequence of improvisations there was nothing
in the world that was more exciting and the dancers loved Barry Rogers."

I'm reminded by the end of this last quote of a great mambo dancer named Luis Flores,
better known as "Luis Máquina." In a 1993 interview he told me, "The Spanish salsa
people are not listeners, we are dancers." The truth of this assertion can never
be overstressed when considering the music of La Perfecta, or of any great dance orchestra;
it's the dancers who are the quintessential consumers of the product. This is rarely
discussed on any level other than the most superficial in most print coverage of
Latin music. Considering the record collecting mindset that drives much writing on
the subject, this is hardly surprising. One of the few writers who has consistently
put equal emphasis on dance and music is Robert Farris Thompson. An early chronicler
of Palladium history, Thompson had ample opportunity to see La Perfecta in this setting.
The Palladium closed its doors in 1966; two years later, he invited Barry Rogers
to lecture at Yale. It wasn't until then that he realized the depth of Barry's connection to movement. "I had films from the Palladium with no sound, Barry looked at the
screen and from the feet reconstructed the sound and played off the line of the music.
Now these little innocent Yale students had never heard Palladium-type intensity,
I mean they had never heard a trombone that loud! But remember, in the Palladium if
it isn't all-out intensity you're going lose your audience. Well, he was Palladium
trained so he had learned to pick up notes off of the heels and toes of the people,
he saw them as eighth notes and whatever. Barry's genius was to have such a highly defined
inner pulse control in the African sense, that if you look at the feet of the guys
in the movie boom!, he was able to reconstruct what kind of mambo they were dancing
to, that it was a fast batiri or a slow kain. He made me see the dance floor as sheet
music." One thing that Thompson always noticed about Palladium musicians in general
was their athleticism. "I remember interviewing Alfred Levy, aka Alfredito, and asked
him, 'Why didn't you play the Palladium more?' He said, 'Well, the reason I don't
play at the Palladium, man, the Palladium's a laundry!' I'll never forget that,
the Palladium's a laundry,
you've got to work
and then I realized, yeah! And I watched Barry play, sweat pouring down from his
hair, his thick, athletic neck. The same thing with Gilbert López, all
those guys, it was like the Superbowl. That's another part of him, it may be that
the strain of producing all out mambo sounds at Palladium intensity may have weakened
his heart." When I asked Thompson if Barry Rogers participated in sports avocationally, he maintained that Barry's athletics were on the bandstand. "There's an article
about some people who overeat and remain thin, the study shows they fidget it off.
Most of the salseros are always fidgeting left to right. The African style is that
you don't play
an instrument, you dance
it, and man, was he into that! He danced the trombone as intensely as Johnny Pacheco
danced his flute." For anyone who remembers Pacheco in his prime, that's saying
a lot. By expressing themselves with this kind of abandon, Pacheco and Rogers went
far beyond putting on a great show. They bonded with their audience to a very rare degree.

La Perfecta's initial audience was heavily Puerto Rican, the majority ethnic group
that patronized Bronx venues such as the Tritons and the Caravana Club (Eddie's early
'60's audiences at Brooklyn's church dances probably contained a strong Italian and
Jewish element.) The crowd that Eddie won at the Palladium was the African Americans.
Some insight into this process can be gained by listening to African American low
brass groups that play gospel-inflected call and response patterns in Central Park
and other New York public spaces. Mark Weinstein describes the first time he heard the
Fabulous Hummingbirds, a band of five trombones and a tuba. "When I heard them I
fell down because the lead trombone player was doing exactly what Barry did! Now
Barry really loved rhythm and blues, and what he was doing was playing a rhythm and blues kind
of shout against a salsa vamp. But it wasn't until I heard these guys, this trombone
band from somewhere in Saint Albans and South Jamaica, that I realized that Barry
had really
invented something, and it was using the trombone to play essentially vocalistic
music using the inflections of the trombone the way a voice could do it. 'Cause
that's what the trombone can do,
it can do what a voice can do. So Barry was playing trombone like a rhythm and blues
singer and that's
what connected with the black audience." It's been said that Barry Rogers was one
of the first to play the trombone in the manner of Felix Chapottín, Chocolate Armenteros,
or any great Afro-Cuban trumpet player - that is to say, like a great sonero.
Playing in the most typical Cuban way possible was one of Barry's principal goals.
He made it his business to understand how the music was structured, so that he could
play and write in a manner that grew organically from the music rather than imposing externally derived techniques. His understanding of tumbao was sound enough to enable
him to play an occasional second conga part during Tommy López solos; considering
Tommy's demands on a personal and musical level, this was obviously no small feat!
Barry's understanding of Cuban musical structures was further deepened through intense
listening to the music of Arsenio Rodríguez and study of tres playing (he learned
this instrument well enough to record with La Perfecta, Johnny Pacheco, and the Cesta
All Stars.) Listening to Cuban 78 rpm records with Manny Oquendo and dubbing many onto
open reel tape provided a fine sense of Afro-Cuban musical nuance. As much as Barry
Rogers respected and loved the Cuban models he studied so assiduously, copying them
was not enough. One fundamental difference between the original and Barry's interpretation
involves the fundamental grounding of typical Cuban brass soloing in diatonic harmony,
with occasional chromatic passages of an ornamental nature. The excellence of Barry's ear and his jazz background enabled him to hear harmonies implied by the basic
diatonic idiom, and to graft on extensions in a clear and logical way. Likewise,
his experience both as a player and collector of R & B allowed him to incorporate
the blues scale into Latin music to an unprecedented degree. The vocal inflections and
rhythmic concept of King Curtis, James Brown, and other Rogers favorites were a rich
stylistic vein he mined successfully for the rest of his life. In listening to Barry's final solo on "No Me Hagas Sufrir" (Eddie Palmieri - Eddie Palmieri
) one is struck immediately by how Barry phrases, articulates, slides, and bends the
pitches in a way that bears amazing likeness to a great soul singer. For a listener
with any experience whatsoever in listening to R & B, it's easy to create words in
one's own mind for the trombone line, and to imagine Otis Redding singing them. It is
this aspect of Barry's talent that is one of the major factors in Eddie Palmieri's
success in reaching out beyond his own culture.

The importance of Barry Rogers to Eddie Palmieri in so many ways and on so many levels
is recognized by everyone who ever worked with any of his groups. It's true that
Eddie gained a lot from being around Barry; it's also true that Barry found La Perfecta to be a tremendous learning experience. With Manny Oquendo as the band's bongocero, timbalero,
and Cuban music guru in residence, how could it be otherwise? A less known aspect
of how the Eddie Palmieri experience benefited Barry is suggested by Joan Fagin,
an English fashion designer and long time close friend of Barry's. "He felt that
they had collaborated really well, that they were great together because Eddie could provide
the basic idea and he would develop it and do the arrangement. And that's how
he preferred to work because he found it very difficult to innovate himself, innovate
in the sense of creating a melody or anything like that. He admired people who could do
that, this included his wife Louise, who he said was very good at that, and Eddie,
but he had trouble with that. Even just a little phrase, he could do something with
it but to start from zero was not his thing."

One fascinating aspect of the Eddie/Barry symbiosis is La Perfecta's arrangements,
specifically the trombone writing. When it came time to create horn lines, Barry's
experience as a listener to jazz records and participant in jam sessions paid off
tremendously. The trombone playing of J. J. Johnson is often cited as a major influence
on Barry, the obvious parallel being that between the J.J. Johnson/Kai Winding duo
and Eddie's various two trombone frontlines. In terms of approach to the horn itself,
J.J. and Barry are night and day, J.J. having the more refined technique and Barry being
the brasher and more strident of the two (there's more to follow about Barry's relation
with the trombone...). Joe Orange claims that Barry's favorite jazz trombonist of
the early '60's was Julian Priester; he quotes Barry as saying that J.J. was a great
player but altogether too easy to superficially imitate. Perhaps the real substance
found in the rather facile comparison between Barry and J.J. can be found in examining their approach to arranging. Although the musical contexts are certainly different,
it's logical to compare the J.J. and Kai Winding lineup with the Barry Rogers/José
Rodrigués equivalent strictly in terms of the parameters of how the instruments function. To begin with, the difficulty of writing for two trombones is the difficulty of
any kind of two part composing. Searching the collected works of even the greatest
composers will yield very few masterpieces written for two single line instruments.
Then there's the issue of the limitations of the instrument vis-a-vis the idiosyncrasies
of manipulating the slide. This can be true even for as great a technician as J.J.
Johnson (for that matter, Barry Rogers was no slouch when it came to slide technique.) The notes played by J.J. and Kai on their classic albums are cannily chosen for
their intervallic weight and for their artful use of two of the oldest devices in
any composer's bag of tricks: tension and release. It is especially in their ballad
work that one can hear frequent use of diatonic dissonance, also known as "white note dissonance."
Slow moving passages using voicings based on seconds or fourths open up a large
number of possibilities for resolution, and these possibilities are used to their
fullest potential.

No aspect of J.J. Johnson's musical landscape was terra incognita for Barry Rogers,
who knew J.J.'s records and caught his club appearances. One of the great thrills
of Barry's life was sharing the stage of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw with J.J.'s group
as a member of Jimmy Wormworth's American Jazz Quintet in the summer of 1957. It's my
contention that J.J.'s arranging concepts were absorbed by Barry, whether consciously
or otherwise. Barry's economy as a writer is as pronounced as his economy as a
player; this is obvious from listening to La Perfecta albums. A listener can forget that
there are usually only two trombones on these records, the ear sometimes being fooled
by the craft with which the notes have been selected and the intensity with which
they have been played. When a third trombone is available (an example being the bolero
"Contento Estoy"), it's also a shock that there are only three horns; the mastery
of shell voicings and clever use of simultaneous major and minor harmony is a guarantee
for some gorgeous backgrounds for the lead instrument or voice. When we ask who wrote
any of these arrangements (Joe Orange thinks that the three trombone version of "Contento
Estoy" was written by Eddie), we may be posing an unanswerable question; in some ways, trying to separate the Palmieri from the Rogers contributions to a La Perfecta
arrangement can be compared to unscrambling an egg. Eddie Palmieri has always given
Barry Rogers full credit for exposing him to a tremendous variety of new musical
ideas, particularly from the cutting edge of early 1960's jazz. As noted, this relationship
lacked fixed roles of teacher and student. Arranger and trumpet player Marty Sheller
alluded to this type of musical symbiosis when I asked him to comment on their mutual growth as writers. "I think they both had the same way of thinking about harmony.
That's why it's almost interchangeable, the arrangements that Barry would do and
the arrangements that Eddie would do. It's almost like Duke Ellington and Billy
Strayhorn." Particularly worthy of note is a mutual interest in harmonic exploration,
a topic which fascinated (and still fascinates) Eddie Palmieri; this resulted in
genuine and wonderful forms of musical dialogue between Eddie and Barry. The trombone-based
introduction to the Palmieri composition "Solo Pensar en Ti" (from the Azúcar pa' Ti
album) is replete with mystery and expectation, which is created by a kind of harmonic
ambiguity between the keys of F minor and A flat minor. The harmonies outlined by
the intervals of the two trombone parts are mirrored and developed marvelously in
a series of runs and other pianistic devices improvised by Eddie. Exactly who created
this arrangement? To me the real question is this: could such an arrangement have
been created in any way other than the Palmieri/Rogers collaboration?

With all of the sharing of ideas between the two key musicians of La Perfecta, there
is one aspect of the music that clearly comes from Barry Rogers - the voicing of
the trombone parts. Joe Orange remembers driving to the Palmieri home in Brentwood,
New York in Barry's Volkswagen. "Eddie had written out the charts on the piano, he had
copied the trombone parts and we would play them. And then we would start to just
discuss and change and move things around so that it felt right for the trombones.
He really wrote for the trombone, other than the volume it's very comfortable playing Eddie's
music on the trombone, the range is perfect. I'm sure he got that from Barry, the
music lent
itself very, very easily to the trombone." Compare Mon Rivera's charts for three
and four trombones with the horn parts created by Barry Rogers and Eddie Palmieri.
An intuitive man for whom making music was as natural as breathing, Mon's arrangements
used simple diatonic harmonies often presented homorhythmically. The chord changes
are often limited to tonic and dominant harmony, with an occasional subdominant or
other scale degree. His triads are usually voiced as closely as possible; octaves
are common. La Perfecta's charts show a far greater degree of harmonic intricacy and jazz
influence without sacrificing one iota of sabor.
On Mon Rivera's recordings the most common high note for the trombones is the G
above the piano's middle C; some A's and a very rare B flat can be heard. Sometimes
it seems that where Mon's trombone sections leave off range-wise, Eddie's begin.
Much of what Barry plays on La Perfecta albums lies between the F above middle C and the
C a fifth above this note. There's no question that his exploitation of a consistently
higher range than any previous trombonist in Latin music contributed to much of La
Perfecta's visceral excitement. Writing in this range also has a practical advantage
- the trombonist will normally have to use only the first three or four positions,
and will not have to move the slide as far as playing parts written in a middle to
lower range. It is this middle to lower range where much of Mon Rivera's trombone
parts are written. In addition to his work with La Perfecta, Joe Orange subbed on
Mon Rivera's band at dances and recorded with him. He observed: "You can hear a lot
of trombone bands where the writer doesn't understand the instrument he's writing for like
Eddie did, and that's the difference. And you can even hear the awkwardness in the
execution, Mon's is kind of rough because he didn't write for that upper middle register. His lines may look easy on paper, but they can be a lot more awkward than they
look. But Eddie really knew where the sound of the trombone was, which is really
in that middle to upper register." It must be noted that playing in this range was
one of the innovations of innovative trombonists of the late 1920's, giving them a newly
acquired facility compared with earlier players. As a student of the playing of
Jack Teagarden, Lawrence Brown, and J.C. Higginbotham, Barry Rogers understood this
perfectly. It must also be said that the last thing on my mind is to show the least particle
of disrespect for the brilliance of Mon Rivera's rhythmic concept, his greatness
as a sonero, and the place he has won in the collective heart of Puerto Rico. My
point is that Eddie Palmieri and Barry Rogers set the highest possible standards for trombone
writing, regardless of musical genre.

Eddie Palmieri's periodic financial and organizational quagmires and struggles with
his own personal demons are well known within the Latin music industry. In his 1976
Down Beat
interview with writer John Storm Roberts, he addressed these issues with great candor.
1968 was the last year in which Barry Rogers worked for Eddie Palmieri on a regular
basis (this was after his participation in the Champagne
album). Over the next decade and a half he would return to the Palmieri organization
on a per project basis. Recorded fruits of these later collaborations include Sentido, The Sun of Latin Music,
and Eddie Palmieri,
some of the greatest Latin music ever committed to disc. Nevertheless, Barry needed
a more dependable way of supporting his family. A temporary solution was joining
the house band at Lloyd Price's Turntable in October 1968 (this club was known as
Birdland in its previous incarnation.) It was also time for Barry to look for fresh musical
challenges and play not only with New York's best Latin musicians, but with New York's
best musicians, period.

That f@#kin' trombone!

Before moving on to Barry Roger's life after La Perfecta, it is important to examine
his relationship with his chosen instrument. First, a few words on this instrument's
relationship with the music itself (and only
a few words, the history of the trombone in Latin music is a topic very much worthy
of its own
article.) The early 1960's represents a watershed for Latin trombone playing. Up
till this period trombones had added color and fullness of sound to the Latin bands
that were open to using them and able to pay them (this is, of course, a vastly oversimplified statement.) For René Hernandéz, Chico O'Farrill, and others who wrote "mambo
music" in a layered fashion, having a trombone section added one more layer to interact
with trumpets and saxophones. This supplementary role was to change; by the end
of the decade in question the trombone was established as an integral part of salsa's
front line. It's generally accepted that La Perfecta's popularity both with dancers
and record collectors was the key factor in this change; it's axiomatic that Barry's
trombone playing has much to do with this. Never before had there been a trombone player
in Latin music who was equally featured - not even Beny Moré's "Tojo" Jiménez (who
Barry was very much aware of.) No one had ever made comparable use of the upper
part of the trombone's range, or played with anything resembling his tonal and emotional
intensity. It may very well be true that the experience of hearing La Perfecta's
recordings, as dynamic as they are, is only a pale shadow of what was experienced
at their dances. This has been said by every dancer and musician with whom I've ever brought
up this topic. However, La Perfecta's recordings suggest the incredible volume level
of Eddie's trombone section, and Barry in particular. Simply put by Joe de Mare,
"Big, fat sound, biggest sound I ever heard on a trombone!" Trombonistically speaking, how did Barry create his sound? Answering this question
requires us to consider his unorthodox schooling: Mark Weinstein, Louise Rogers,
and Chris Rogers agree that Barry probably never took a trombone lesson in his life.
Mark Weinstein expands further on this thought. "Barry was not a schooled musician, he
had pretty good natural setting on the trombone. One of the real tests of whether
you have a good, balanced embouchure is whether you can go from the low register
to the high register. I had an enormous low register, listen to "Lázaro y Su Micrófono" where
the trombone plays endlessly from low B flat to low C to low F - I originated that
lick, I was the first guy who played it. But I had my jaw so spread that I couldn't
move up from that register, I had to reset my embouchure. Not Barry, Barry could go
down to the bottom. He didn't have a fat low register, as big as mine, but he could
go easily from the bottom to the top. He had good placement but he played with enormous
pressure. He also played the high register as a pressure player, never played above
a high D, sometimes played mainly D flats. He also tended when he
wrote the charts - and his charts were always the best charts, to be perfectly honest
- to write high and then he would always play lead. José was not a good lead player,
José was a powerhouse but he was really comfortable in the middle and lower register. Now Barry didn't use as big a mouthpiece as I did but he may have used too big
a mouthpiece and he may have used too much top lip, I don't know. I mean when I
think of Barry all I think of is a red piece of meat between his nose and his lower
lip, I mean that he got from so much pressure."

This hyper-intense approach to the trombone was exacerbated by an almost complete
absence of the kind of sound reinforcement taken for granted in today's salsa world.
"The thing that nobody realizes about the '60's", continues Weinstein, "was that
we didn't have microphones, if there was one mike the singer got it. Now Eddie always had
an amp and the bass player always had an amp and Georgie would play on the microphone
and the trombone players would sweat, sweat blood. Oh, yeah! Barry would sometimes
catch the edge of the microphone by pointing his trombone towards the microphone.
But because we were always playing during the montunos the singer was in the way.
And the second trombone was more grueling in a way because you never got to relax
your chops whereas Barry could vary what he was playing. But to Barry music was everything,
and if in order to get something out he had to jam the mouthpiece in and grind his
lip into his teeth he would do it. He also had cold sore problems, he was very susceptible to cold sores and like most brass players he'd get the cold sore right on the
rim. I mean he and I for a while were both Blistex addicts - we would carry Blistex
around, rub it on our lips. Now think of a place like the Palladium, big barn,
you knew you were playing loud enough when you were bouncing off the back wall. Now that's
tremendous
volume!"

During a long and candid interview conducted with Mark Weinstein, a picture began
to emerge in my mind of a more or less continuous struggle between Barry and his
chosen instrument. I asked Mark if anyone had ever questioned whether the trombone
was the most appropriate vehicle for Barry's natural gifts. His reply: "Barry and I never
called it a trombone, we called it a fuckin'
trombone. Man, that was it, I mean for Barry and I the trombone was a fucking cross
that you bear! We hated
the fucking thing because you couldn't do shit
with it! The fuckin' trombone, man, to go from a B flat to a B natural you go from
first to seventh position, you have to move three and a half feet. I mean that is
stupid!
And if you play it with the stupid trigger then you're carrying all that extra weight
in your left hand. The trombone stinks!" This was confirmed by others, including
Louise Rogers. "He always hated the trombone. He studied over the years with a great diagnostician named Carmine Caruso and he worked at it and he was dutiful and fairly
faithful. But his heart wasn't really in being an instrumentalist, his heart was
in having a voice that he could speak with and that he had in spades always and that
was his reason for playing the trombone. He loved the sound of it, he loved the voice
of it, he hated the problems of it."

Young New York Latino musicians of the 1960's were mesmerized by the fiery trombones
heard on La Perfecta's records and in personal appearances. One was a teenaged Willie
Colón, who became aware of Barry's solo through Joe Cotto's hit recording "Dolores." A fledgling trumpet player, Willie immediately memorized the solo and decided to
switch instruments: "When I first heard a trombone solo by Barry I said, 'What the
hell is
that?' It sounded like an elephant, it was so big and angry and powerful and just
brilliant. I started doubling on the trumpet and trombone and then finally I dropped
the trumpet and I started a two trombone band. And that's when things really started
happening because it was such a contrast from these big bands with all the saxophones.
You know, the old-timers would get up and they'd have like four trumpets, five saxes,
a flute player, you know, a legion of musicians on the stage. And then we'd come
up and it was like one of these little rap groups, two trombones and a rhythm section.
That became the standard of the salsa band now, if you listen to salsa radio now
the rule is that it's a trombone band." Or, if not literally a trombone band, a
trumpet-and-trombone frontline. One of the most common dispositions of these instruments
is two trumpets and two trombones, a scoring initially popularized by Larry Harlow
(not coincidentally, many of Harlow's charts for these instruments were written by
Mark Weinstein, one of Barry Roger's earliest disciples.)

There were older trombonists who were turned off by what they perceived as the crassness
of this new style. One of them was Jack Hitchcock, a veteran big band musician who
was no stranger to Latin music. His credits included work both as a trombonist and vibraphonist with José Curbelo and writing for both Herbie Mann and the short-lived
but exciting Patato/Mangual Band of 1960. The changing expectations in Latin trombone
playing were not to his liking; by the 1970's he had left the Latin scene and was
making his living playing club dates. When asked what was expected of trombone players
in the Charlie Palmieri Orchestra of the mid '60's, his response was "Loud, louder
and loudest." Hitchcock said: "You could almost blame Barry Rogers for what happened
to trombones in Latin music. I got to love Barry a lot, man, we got very close but
at the time I hated his guts. Because I was essentially a rather soft trombone player
and I liked it that way. Now Eddie Palmieri was the
hot band and Barry and José Rodrígues, they pumped that stuff out and it was so
loud, I mean it was incredible. Then Willie Colón comes up after him and says, 'That
must be the way you play!' So I mean all these guys are blatting away and I finally
got to play louder out of self-defense. 'Cause whether I was with Orlando Marín
or whoever I was with it was, 'Hey, man, can't you play louder?', 'cause they didn't feel
they were getting' their money's worth. And poor Barry, he was sick half the time,
I mean he was always
coming down with colds. He looked like death warmed over and it wasn't because of
drugs or anything like that, I think it just took so much out of him."

Like many Latino trombonists coming up in the 1970's, Angel "Papo" Vásquez received
his first real incentive to master the instrument from listening to La Perfecta records.
Papo's first meeting with one of his idols provided some advice that surprised him. "Barry told me, 'Listen, man, when you play with these electric bass players, people
with electric instruments, you put your bell into the microphone.' He kind of messed
up his chops when he was with Eddie Palmieri's band. They used to play real loud
and he used to not use the microphone too much. And that's when they started using the
baby bass, the electric Ampeg bass and electric pianos and I guess he out-blew his
chops." It's a given among brass players that one's "chops" are slow to develop
and easy to mess up. When considering Barry's early "chop problems," it is important to
keep in mind that when La Perfecta was formed he had not been playing much more than
ten years. Viewed in the context of a brass player's entire career, that's hardly
any time at all. Joe Orange has a story from this period. "A couple of times I talked Barry
into coming over to my house so we could play classical duets together. Barry couldn't
play! I mean he could (makes loud noise) but he was doing that so much that when he had to play with a lot of control and softness and get into the high register
he couldn't do it! Now the problem wasn't reading, he could read. It was his approach
to the horn, he could just play what he could play at that time." As surprising
as it may be to hear a story like this about one of salsa's canonized heroes, it makes
sense when one considers the length of time Barry had been playing and the kind of
work he was doing. I hasten to add that Joe Orange is totally in awe of the greatness
of Barry's ears and the brilliance of his conceptions; he's on record as saying that Barry
Rogers was the most musical trombone player he's ever heard.

Rather than studying with trombone players, it was Barry's choice to seek help from
non-trombone-playing instrumental diagnosticians. One of New York's most celebrated
"chop doctors" was a saxophone player named Carmine Caruso, who was known for extraordinary insight into how to make a brass player's lip, air, and psyche work productively
together. Barry's son Chris is a highly gifted trumpet player and composer/arranger,
a featured soloist for five years with Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band. He has
also worked with many of the top Latin groups of the '80's and '90's. He was always
aware of his father's search for self-improvement. "He definitely practiced every
day, I have vivid memories of him practicing. In fact if I listen to my childhood
cassettes of myself playing with my friends you can often hear my dad practicing in the background.
Later on he was more comfortable with being able to take a few days off and be able
to come back strong. But he had a very specific routine when he started practicing, you know, stuff for the brass embouchure. Carmine Caruso type slurring, harmonic
exercises, he would always do that to keep his range up."

It was only after abandoning full-time work in the Latin scene that Barry became successful
in resolving his struggles with his chosen instrument; the need to play "loud, louder
and loudest" became a thing of the past. Working regularly during the 1970's as a recording artist both facilitated and necessitated a less strident approach to
playing. Generally speaking, musicians who spend most of their professional lives
playing for microphones play softer and with less tonal edge than musicians who perform
in large concert halls or who do most of their work with dance bands. The "fuzz and
buzz" that makes the sound of an instrument project well in a large space is worse
than unnecessary in a recording situation. Microphones are very unforgiving of bright,
edgy tonal qualities, which tend to record poorly. This approach became more and more
internalized by Barry throughout the '70's. Still, it was impossible to mistake
his playing for anyone else's. A thorough student of his father's playing, Chris
Rogers offers the following comments. "There was a definite evolution to his approach with
the trombone. He probably would refer to his style in the beginning as 'elephant
trombone' because he was just pounding the horn on his face, playing really
loud. I don't know how he could do it, and definitely in the long run that's not
the productive way to play. If you're really overblowing, you're playing your loudest
the whole time and you're probably cutting your dynamic range. I think that's probably how it was on the gigs, but I know that changed. Listen to Eddie Palmieri's 'White
Album,' I mean Barry's tone on that is amazing
and is so centered because he had somehow gotten to a point eventually where he decided
OK, he's not going to overblow, if there's a mike he's going use it and he's not
going to kill himself. On the liner notes for Eddie and Cal Tjader's album [Cal Tjader & Eddie Palmieri: El Sonido Nuevo
] they describe one of my father's solos as swashbuckling. I think my dad never lost
that quality, he just refined it. That's the way he played, graceful but amazingly
strong presence regardless of whether he was overblowing or playing softly. Amazing
dynamics in his playing, which I would love to hear in other players, that I very rarely
hear. So I still think of 'elephant trombone' as just a way of describing really
loud, distorted, metal-in-your-face playing."

By 1974, the year of some of his greatest collaboration with Eddie Palmieri, Barry's
rethinking of his instrument was already paying off. His astounding work on "Cobarde"
shows him playing passages up to a high F, something he would have never dreamed
of doing during the 1960's. On "Páginas de Mujer" from the 1981 release Eddie Palmieri
(aka "The White Album"), Barry tosses off beautifully centered high C's and D's,
using all of the crafty pitch choices and emotional directness of the halcyon days
of La Perfecta. Part of this newly found oneness of his chops, his ears, and his
soul are attributable to a period of study in 1979 and 1980 with one of the greatest brass
playing "troubleshooters" ever. This was Vince Penzarella, who has held jobs with
the Baltimore Symphony and Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and is currently playing
second trumpet with the New York Philharmonic. Another outstanding Penzarella student is Chris
Rogers, whose time in this brass guru's studio coincided with his father's. The
1980's became a period of progressive refinement by Barry Rogers of fundamentals
grasped in the late '70's.

Dreams

"Over the last three decades, no musical innovation in jazz has been more important
- and more controversial - than the wedding of jazz improvisation with rock music.
The last coherent radical movement to emerge in jazz, it has continued to evolve
in a way that most other areas of jazz have not" (Stuart Nicholson, Jazz Rock: A History).

"There was really no term for what we were doing back then, nobody called it fusion.
We were just searching for new ways to break down barriers. It was a very fertile
period. People were experimenting, trying different things. It was an exciting
time to be in New York" (Michael Brecker, quoted by Bill Milkowski in liner notes for CD
reissue of Dreams).

Jazz musicians have always played other vernacular musics, if for no other reason
than to help pay the rent. Whether or not one wants to waste time arguing whether
Barry Rogers was or was not a jazz musician, he embodies the jazz sensibility and
was brought up musically with jazz values. Having said this, it's equally true that he was
no hidebound purist. Known among his friends as a musical omnivore, his pantheon
of musical heroes includes the masters of American black music of all genres, as
previously noted. Backing New Orleans blues stylist Lloyd Price in late 1968 and early 1969
proved in many ways to be an enjoyable musical experience. However, playing the
same music night after night in a show band was not how he wanted to spend the rest
of his life. An alternative way of combining his love of jazz, funk, and R & B came in 1970
when he met a young tenor sax phenom named Mike Brecker; the setting was a band called
Birdsong, an R & B group with jazz leanings led by a singer and songwriter named
Edwin Birdsong. The chemistry between Mike and Barry was instantaneous. One feeling
that Barry shared with Mike Brecker was enthusiasm for some original material written
by two rock musicians named Doug Lubahn and Jeff Kent. Eventually Mike was able
to sweet talk his trumpet playing older brother Randy into coming to a rehearsal with Lubahn
and Kent; somehow drummer Billy Cobham was coaxed into showing up. This was the
beginning of Dreams, a band that Louise Rogers considers to be the most significant
part of Barry's life and legacy. She claims that: "Dreams was in ways much more incredible
than the Palmieri band, because every person in that band was absolutely a pinnacle
talent. The energy in that band, it was exactly the same, it was Barry, and Mike
will tell you so. I think he describes him as the balls of the band. And the records are
nothing compared to what it was, it was unbelievable! If you can ever get some
of the last live tapes of the band you'll hear that it was a whole groundwork for
funk and fusion, it's all in there." The arrangements for the front line of trumpet, tenor
sax, and trombone (shades of Hugo Dickens!) were done collaboratively. Randy Brecker
says: "There might have been little snippets that were arranged by more than one guy
and, I think, looking back on it, Barry probably had a bigger hand than Mike and I. Maybe
not in the original idea of the part, but he was ahead of anybody in the band, I think,
harmonically and as far as his experience. So he would sometimes say you play this
note, I'll play that note or whatever, he was rhythmically more astute than I think
we were. If anything he was kind of the straw boss of the whole group. Other times
we'd just come up with voicings, he was great at finding inner parts and finding
these weird notes that would fit. We all were pretty good at it but I think he was ahead
of all of us." Mike Brecker agrees: "He would always think of great horn riffs and
we used to do them live. He'd think up things on stage, he was a good arranger and
sort of arranged on the fly. And some of the things that we would come up with live just
became the arrangements that we recorded."

Chris Rogers quotes Mike Brecker as having said that Barry Rogers was the Coltrane
of the trombone. Considering Mike's mastery of the style of Coltrane, among others,
that's a pretty extraordinary statement. When questioned about this attribution,
Mike replied: "I might have said that, and I meant it in a way that he had that kind of intensity
and conviction. He had a tremendous conviction when he was playing and he could
just make a rhythm section levitate, he would just carry you right along. Barry
used to say that the only way he could do that was if the rhythm section inspired him.
There were times when he couldn't play, if he felt nothing was happening in the
rhythm section he didn't bother playing. But if he got excited all hell broke loose."
The regularly observed phenomenon of hell breaking loose at Dreams concerts was pretty
much guaranteed by the presence of Billy Cobham. Both the musical and visual impact
was overwhelming. According to Mike Brecker: "The music was built around Billy, who
was playing in a very unique way at the time. He had, and still has, an enormous amount
of technique and played the drums in a way that I had never heard anybody
play. He was a burning R & B drummer and great jazz drummer, he could do both, and
that was unusual. And so we took the tunes written by Doug and Jeff, they wrote
really nice songs and they sang them and then kind of arranged them around Billy."

By late 1971 Billy Cobham had defected to join the newly formed Mahavishnu Orchestra.
Dreams became legendary for holding drum auditions for months; between sixty and
seventy drummers were heard (Alan Schwartzberg, Rick Marotta, Steve Gadd and Bruce
Ditmas are among the handful that actually worked briefly with the band.) By this time
keyboardist Don Grolnick and bassist Will Lee were part of the Dreams family. In
spite of the level of talent assembled, Dreams was history by 1972. The inability
of any of the drummers, as excellent as some of them were, to fully be able to replace Billy
Cobham is cited by members as a major part of this decision. For reasons having
mostly to do with the vagaries of the promotion and business side of music, Dreams
was never able to translate the power of its music into even a vague equivalent in terms
of commercial acceptance. Their concerts consisted of working rock venues and colleges,
usually opening for established acts such as Three Dog Night, Tina Turner and the J. Geils Band. Their recorded legacy consists of two albums, both issued by Columbia. Much
of their legacy is more indirect; the emotional force and sophistication of their
work is still talked about by musicians lucky enough to have heard them. As stated
by Down Beat
staff writer Bill Milkowski, "Rather than being a band of jazzers checking out the
visceral power of rock, or a band of rockers making feeble attempts at improvising,
Dreams was a balanced act; rock and jazz musicians bringing their influences to bear,
creating together, melding their disparate sensibilities into a wholly unique hybrid."
For Barry, the stridency of the La Perfecta days was replaced by an ever growing
mastery of the horn without sacrificing intensity and conviction (in fact, it is
the considered opinion of Chris Rogers that his father's mature playing begins in this period.)
Jazz trombonist Gary Valente remembers hearing Dreams as a teenager; as overwhelming
as the whole experience was, his strongest memory is of Barry's playing: "He had
innovated a new style, what can I say, no one had played with that sound and vibrato.
And most of the thing was the sound over the band, it was over the whole shit, it
was very present. So when he took a solo it was really strong and up over everything,
man, and that was a big influence." Considering the wide circulation of Dreams' alumnae
throughout the emerging world of jazz/rock and their key presence in the cream of
the fusion world, is it possible to say that Dreams is to the music of the '70's
and '80's what La Perfecta was to the nascent salsa of the '60's? If so, Barry Rogers
can be considered by extension one of the fathers of fusion and jazz/rock.

Playing with Dreams exposed Barry to a world he had never been part of; the elite
who live their professional lives in the studios of New York recording musical backing
for jingles, film, and pop albums. His ears, stylistic versatility and reading ability more than qualified him for this kind of work; his closeness to active studio players
such as Don Grolnick and the Breckers provided the all-important links to contractors
and producers. Artists with whom he recorded in this period include James Taylor,
Carly Simon, Aerosmith, Average White Band, Chic, Todd Rundgren, and Tina Turner.
By the mid 70's, Barry was highly in demand in New York's recording scene. Only
the very longest established trombonists in the music business would have been routinely
called ahead of him. The music world abounds with cliches about musicians who succeed
as recording artists due to affable and completely inoffensive personalities, utter
reliability, and a complete lack of any personal quality in their playing. Randy
Brecker compared Barry's way of playing with that of some hypothetical faceless studio player:
"He could do it, he could play in a section but his real forte was really playing
out. That's what we used to like
about him, he would really put a lot of air through the horn. That was his whole
sound as opposed to somebody like Bill Watrous or Urbie Green, who were probably
first call back then. Guys like that play a lot softer and play with a lot of agility
and finesse, probably more finesse than Barry. Barry, he had a lot of technique but it
was more just on-the-spot excitement and playing the hippest notes that you could
hear, he just had great ears. I mean there were a lot of guys probably that could
play faster or higher or whatever, but Barry would play the hippest stuff."

Producing

Barry Rogers was endowed with a highly acute pitch sense and a rhythmic feel that
was both gutsy and precise. In addition, he had the ability to keep track of detail
without losing awareness of the big picture (put in other words, the capacity for
functioning simultaneously as telescope and microscope.) Combined with a knack for the technical
and mechanical, whether regarding boats, cars, electronic equipment, or cameras,
a picture emerges of someone ideally qualified to direct recording sessions and deal with post production. This, in fact, was true of Barry Rogers. His sense of how
to deal with musical and technical problems that constantly arise in a studio setting
improved countless recording projects. Many of his accomplishments in this area
have never been credited, financially or otherwise. In a 1974 interview with John Storm
Roberts, he presented the dilemma in which he often found himself: "Now where do
you draw the line between arranging and producing? You can't. And of course you
never get paid for it, for that reason. But I did a hell of a lot of work on some albums that
no one knows about, including tape editing, producing, which included doing overdubs
for other musicians. I mean they'd leave me alone for hours, and I ran the sessions,
which I enjoyed doing. I gave it, and that's the way I am. I give more than I ever
get paid for." Although listed as the arranger of "Un Dia Bonito" (The Sun of Latin Music), he is not credited for the layering and molding of sound so brilliantly realized
in this number. In his 1977 WBAI interview he recalled the sessions: "I produced
everything except the original rhythm track, without horns and without the arrangement.
After the rhythm track was laid down by Eddie and the gang, without horns and without
singing, I had to go in there and cut it all up with a razor blade with an engineer
at the Electric Lady studios and we pieced the entire thing together and overdid
all the horns and the singing later." In a 1998 interview for Descarga's website, Eddie
summarizes Barry's role: " 'Un Dia Bonito' is the maximum of our collaboration ever.
I never played piano like that again and I couldn't do that again if I tried. Because
it was the magic between he and I, he drew it out and I drew everything out of him
too." Artists on whose albums Barry receives non-playing credit, whether for mixing, engineering, or producing, include Rafael Cortijo, David Lahm, Jens Wendleboe, and
the Star-Scape Singers.

One of Barry's closest friends was audio engineer Bernard Fox. Their relationship
involved a very productive exchange, with Barry picking up considerable insight into
recording technique and Bernard becoming acquainted with key concepts of musical
form and style. Interestingly enough, to this day Fox thinks of Barry Rogers as a producer
and not as a trombone player, even though he played trombone to make a living. He
views a great producer the way many symphony musicians view a great conductor: as
a teacher. Hearing his take on what made Barry's producing special recalls the telescope/microscope
hybrid mentioned earlier: "What's interesting is that it's because music is so emotional
we have a tendency to think that we can't analyze it and those that analyze it are unemotional about it. But Barry had that together - I mean there's a reason
why this works and there's a reason why this doesn't work and it ain't that sudden
magical gel. That sudden magical gel could be made to happen, and Barry used to
do that on a continuous basis and I'd see it. I'd see him do it with vocalists who couldn't
sing, who couldn't sing this song. They would suddenly figure it out, he'd explain
it to them and get them to sing it on a line-by-line basis and they'd get it. He'd do it with players and he'd do it with musical structure." Fox comments on Barry's
attention to detail: "Here's a little notebook, it's got 150 pages of little things.
This page doesn't have much on it, OK, because I write big and quick and sloppy.
Imagine very, very, very small writing, much smaller and finer than this. Barry would
generate books like this on every single record he was working on, notes upon notes
upon notes of what he was thinking and how he was approaching it and when he had a thought. And he'd come in with this little book and you would have to overdub four pages
in that book in a day, all totally prepared. I mean normally I go in the studio
with a producer and we listen together and I mark off which lines go together to
assemble and I assemble them. Barry'd come in with all that done. If you wanted to know about
musicians you called up him. If you wanted their phone number you called up Larry
Harlow, if you wanted to know what style they played perfectly you called up Barry."

One of Barry's most justly celebrated productions is Orquesta Broadway's Pasaporte.
Of all the albums made by this charanga, this is arguably the one with the best
production values and the highest technical quality. Bernard served as the audio
engineer of Pasaporte;
the following anecdote reveals how the song "Barrio del Pilar" was recorded: "I've
never been to Puerto Rico, Barry explains to me the kind of feeling we're trying
to capture. OK, we take a piece of multi track tape and cut it into a loop and mix
it down so now we have a loop with a rhythm pattern, in time with the album. We take this
rhythm pattern and we copy it onto an entire reel of two inch tape, so now we have
32 minutes of the same rhythm pattern playing over and over and over again. We
take this and we cut it into the song in time. So instead of having a four minute song we
now have a 34 minute song. We put two microphones on the roof of the building to
mike the street on Eighth Avenue and 54th Street and we book a session for 4:30 Friday
afternoon with a whole bunch of Barry's friends. There's 25 people in the studio, there's
conga drums all over the room. There's people playing percussion, I think we even
had food and drink there. Everybody's having a real good time, everybody's a little
drunk and now we play back this 34 minute "Barrio del Pilar" and invite everybody
to play along feeding the street noise, which is now 5:30 Friday afternoon into the
studio. And wouldn't you know it, you can hear some gunshots, there's car horns
going 'Beep beep, beep beep' and it might have been Frankie Malabé going 'Bop bop, bop bop'
on the conga and you've got this interaction between the street noise and the actual
rhythm of the song. About five minutes later we hear sirens coming onto the street
and now we have 34 minutes of actual street noise with people playing against it like
it would be in real life. We cut this 34 minutes down to 6:32 and that's how that
song got made. Now that's radical thinking for a producer!" This is hardly the
first time this type of layered approach has been used successfully; albums made by Ramsey Lewis
and Marva Whitney immediately come to mind. In the Latin field, this level of studio
creativity was certainly novel, as was the overall patina of sonic refinement. As
Bernard Fox remembers, the time required to achieve these results was also exceptional
for a mid 70's Latin record: "Most producers try to get it done, deliver for the
budget that they gave you. Barry for better or worse didn't care about the budget,
he always did what he ultimately felt needed to be done. Most Latin albums took 40 or
60 hours at that time and here we're into 150 hours and Harvey Averne's screaming,
OK? And then once Pasaporte
came out nobody was going to stop. I mean charanga wasn't happening, salsa was happening
in '75. It was Barry and this album that turned charanga into the big thing it became
again and consequently at that point all the numbers were blown out the window. There was no more, 'Let's do an album in 60 hours' any more, it was, 'What does it
take to make a great album?' 'Cause that album as I remember was on the charts for
seven months, I mean it had one song or another song on the charts for such a long
time that it didn't matter."

By the late 1980's, Linda Ronstadt had acknowledged her Mexican roots, as evidenced
by her highly successfull album Canciones de Mi Padre.
When she became interested in doing a bilingual album drawing on Hispanic Caribbean
musical traditions, Barry Rogers was suggested as the sine qua non of any such project.
After spending time with Linda orienting her to the music, Barry introduced her
to his wife, a talented songwriter and lyricist. The plan was that Barry would produce
an album of bilingual, thematically conceived songs created by Louise Rogers. A
demo recording was made with the cream of New York's salsa and jazz musicians, with
a studio singer laying down the part intended for Linda Ronstadt and with Bernard Fox
as engineer. All of the work was done on spec; this should give readers some idea
of the extent to which Barry was loved, respected, and trusted by his colleagues.
For reasons that have never been clearly explained, the project was abandoned by Ronstadt
and her representatives. None of the musicians were paid. All that remains of this
project is a demo reported by the few who have heard it to be of unimaginably high
quality. For Barry Rogers, this was a disappointment unequal to any in his life. The loss
was not only a career opportunity dazzlingly
close, but a chance for overdue recognition snatched away. This combination of nonpareil talent and name recognition
could have brought a whole new audience to Latin music; the word "crossover" could
have been given a totally new meaning. Or is this word really the most appropriate
one? With a musical vision as broad as that of Barry Rogers, the parts are related
in such an organic whole that there's no need to "cross over."

World musician, musician for the world

The term "world music" is very much a product of the last quarter of the twentieth
century, and very much spawned by the Age of Marketing. Searching for new sounds
from foreign cultures can be a stimulus to intellectual growth and a source of great
pleasure. This process can also turn into a jejune quest for musical novelty of highly
limited shelf life. From such a perspective, the view provided of other cultures
can be a highly patronizing one. In the words of ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik,
sampling ethnic music often amounts to a kind of slumming in the global village.

What's so refreshing about Barry Rogers' musical odyssey is his total freedom from
these limitations, and from the dilettantism that can easily become a kind of baggage
for the musically curious. A close friend of Barry's from the Hugo Dickens days,
Bobby Porcelli can attest to this: "He had more knowledge than everybody about everything,
every kind of music. He was so curious he got into Arabian music, this and so
many things. He learned how to play the tres, the tambora, before I would ever see
any Caucasian horn players do it. He'd always be the first one I'd ever see do these
kind of things. He had a knack for it too, not just being curious and playing terribly
but being curious and really being able to do it. In all these areas when you talk
to people about Barry they'll always say, 'He turned me on to this,' 'he's the first
person who mentioned this name to me,' that comes up constantly with me and with
everybody else who knew him and I don't care what year it was." For Barry Rogers,
listening to music with friends was tantamount to Holy Communion. Mark Weinstein maintains
that those who truly understood the depth of Barry's love of music were those with
whom he shared these experiences: "To be invited to Barry's house to listen to records
was the guarantee of an experience that would transform your thinking about music. Barry
could sit down for hours on end and play records, classical records. I remember
he introduced me to this record called Greek Island and Mountain Music,
I've just never heard anything like it. The music that I stole for Cuban Roots,
it was on a record of a pre-Castro folkloric group that had all of the classic guaguancós
and all the classic comparsas - Barry introduced me to that album. Barry introduced
me to West African music, Barry introduced me to Peter Pears singing with Dennis Brain, who was this amazing French horn player. I mean you would go to Barry's house
and you knew that every single record you would hear would be amazing beyond belief
and that the sequence of records that you would hear would be transcendental. To
listen to Barry's records with Barry was to learn more about music than you could ever
want to learn from another human being."

Barry's musical multi-lingualism can be viewed as a set of variations on lifelong
themes. His early listening experiences and ease of learning has already been noted.
This facility also translated into a gift for learning languages. One of the world's
hoariest bits of wisdom is the observation that "the doctor who treats himself has
a fool for a patient" and numerous variants thereof. Barry turned this cliche upside
down: anyone who teaches himself so many skills so brilliantly stands an excellent
chance of developing into a fine teacher. Robert Farris Thompson recalls an important
lesson at a jam session that included some guaguancó: "Barry laughed and said, 'You
realize that that's a hocket, those are two drums.' A hocket is when the note leaps
from one player to the other and then comes back again. Hocketing is about the most pure,
most ancient African procedure that there is, when you divide the melody among the
people. Of course Ellington did it and Machito - who was the baritone player, Leslie
Johnakins, he opened up that whole current of incandescent Africanness in the hocketing
patterns that are in things like 'Feeding the Chickens.' It's this terraced quality,
each guy is on a different note, a different level, and that's Africanismo. Now
I'm not a hundred per cent sure that he called it a hocket but he definitely drew my
attention to what it was. That was another great lesson." Hocketing is a technique
that goes back to the Middle Ages; its presence in the courts of thirteenth century
France, in the villages of Central Africa, and in the solares of Havana provides one
far-reaching example of musical unity that transcends time and place. Barry Rogers
grasped that unity like very few.

Barry's uncanny ability to absorb the most arcane techniques of music making was demonstrated
during a visit to Robert Farris Thompson's home near Yale University, where he's
taught for some forty years: "Barry discovered that I had some batá drums and to
my amazement he picked them up and he knew how to play them. Ernie Ensley was with
us, he showed Ernie how to do the (sings "Kun KUN KUN KUN") and he showed me how
to do (sings "KON ke KON ke KON KON ke KON ke KON KON"). And then once he had the
two he came in on iya and we fused and we grooved and it was very spectral because batá of
course are loaded with aché. So they started playing themselves, the notes started
going in and out and it was really incredible! I've never played batá before or
since, I don't know why he never explored this in his recording. But knowing Barry I think
he did it as a rhythmic exercise, he had it stored in his mind and he started improvising.
It's like Piazzolla and his new tango, of course he had an awful lot of modern jazz and an awful lot of Western harmony but at the same time he pushed tango back
to the root before the tango, the candombe. The real geniuses do that, the real
geniuses borrow from Europe as deeply as they can but you forget that as deeply as
they drink from Europe they're exploring something else in Africa." Louise Rogers views this
type of creativity from a slightly different perspective: "Barry had an ability to
go to the heart of a given musical vernacular. At the same time he never lost himself,
he was always himself in doing it. Which is why he was not someone who emulates beautiful
things from the past, he was really a creator in the stream of the past."

Finale

On Wednesday, April 18, 1991, Barry Rogers went to sleep in his Washington Heights
apartment. He never woke up. There was no history of any illness that could have
provided any context or explanation. The shock to Barry's friends, family, and colleagues was compounded by the veil of mystery clouding the end of his life. According to
his cousin Heidi Rogers, the autopsy was inconclusive.

The life and work of Barry Rogers is fraught with irony. Not a Latino, he changed
the face of Hispanic Caribbean music. Not a scion of the African Diaspora, he felt,
mastered, performed and taught Afro-Atlantic music as if it were part of his genetic
makeup. Known best as a trombonist, he spent much of his life fighting "that fuckin'
trombone." Although he eventually won, it was an invisible battle to all but the
keenest observers and his closest friends. A man who worshipped John Coltrane and
Sonny Rollins and who began and ended his life playing jazz, he is best known as a salsero.
The de facto leader of almost every band fortunate enough to count him as a member,
he never officially led a band or had a hit record. His role (however vaguely formulated or insufficiently understood) in shaping the sounds of 60's salsa and 70's fusion
masks another achievement, possibly even greater: Barry Rogers can be considered
to be one of the first world musicians. The clouding of this achievement is probably the
greatest irony of all.

Photography Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following people for the use of photographs that appear with this article:
Arthur Jenkins
Joe Rivera
Chris Rogers
Roy Ramirez

Writer's afterword and barely disguised plug

The life and work of Barry Rogers is something that I've been studying on and off
since 1996. Studying this topic has made it easy for me to approach musicians, dancers,
and music industry operatives, regardless of my "insider" or "outsider" status.
Discussing Barry's human and musical qualities seems to encourage openness and articulate
response from interview subjects. Considering the giving way in which people have
opened their hearts and minds when the subject of Barry Rogers has come up, it's
a mitzvah
to make this information available to the world at large.

Those who are diligent in seeking knowledge of Barry's life and work will find a great
deal missing in the above article. There's not a lot of discussion of the role jazz
played in his life, and the additional ironies caused by his love of this music.
There's not very much about Barry's relationship with automobiles. In this respect
I have failed our mutual friend Lenny Seed, who early in my research enjoined me
to collect every possible story about Barry Rogers and Volkswagens. I have totally
neglected to mention the family yacht Harpoon,
or his skills as a photographer and filmmaker. Barry comes from a family filled
with steam locomotive fanatics; his wife is probably reading this piece and pondering
this omission. Of all the hundreds of recordings in which Barry participated, only
the Latin-oriented ones are listed at the end of this article.

Descarga readers, if you were me, what would you
do? Indeed, what would any obsessive record collector and researcher do after coming
up with a mere 12,000 words on a topic of such self-proclaimed importance? The only
possible recourse in such a quandary is to write and publish a book. This, in a
word, is my intention. The book in question should be out by October 1999; it will be
available through Descarga and hopefully through other retailers. My financial goals
exist on three levels. The first is the obvious one, paying for the production costs. The second is to award myself a pre-determined sum of money in partial compensation
for research time and expenses. Any money earned beyond this level (knock on wood)
will be donated to the Point CDC, located at 940 Garrison Avenue in the Hunt's Point
area of the Bronx. This community is one that has always supported the music that Barry
Rogers helped to develop. I'm sure that some of his most fulfilling moments were
spent playing with La Perfecta at the Hunt's Point Palace and the Tritons, both of
which are on the other side of Southern Boulevard from the Point. Since the mid-1990's this marvelous
center has been of inestimable value to the Bronx; wherever Barry is, I'm sure he'd
agree.

For those interested in finding out more about Barry Rogers and his ambiente musical,
there are several worthwhile sources. As an afterward to my 1998 Descarga interview
with Eddie Palmieri, I recommended Robert Farris Thompson's "New Voice From The Barrios,"
published in the 10/28/67 edition of Saturday Review.
Also cited was John Storm Roberts' "Salsa's Prodigal Son," an interview with Palmieri
that appeared in the 4/22/76 edition of Down Beat.
Although considerable time has passed since their printing, both pieces hold up
extremely well, due to the cogent thinking and imaginative writing of both authors.
Another piece of great value is Christopher Washburne's "Play It Con Filin!:
The Swing and Expression of Salsa," which appeared in the fall/winter 1998 issue
of Latin American Music Review, Volume 19, Number 2
(University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.) Washburne's background
as a trombonist and ethnomusicologist, combined with a wonderfully clear and incisive
writing style, makes him uniquely qualified to discuss Barry Rogers. This article contains accurate and well annotated transcriptions of various salsa improvisations,
including the solo from "Páginas de Mujer" referred to at the beginning of this piece.
Qué viva el verdadero rey del trombón criollo!

This is by no means a complete listing of Latin-oriented records that include Barry,
let alone any real indication of the breadth of his discography. David M. Carp's
upcoming book will provide a more inclusive picture of Barry's recording career,
giving readers an idea of his work in jazz, rock, disco, etc. David would be more than happy
to have his coat pulled to recordings that he's missed. He can be reached electronically
at David_Carp@descarga.com.

Interviews used as source material for this article
(all conducted by David M. Carp unless otherwise indicated.)